


Marginalia

by farevenasdecidedtouse



Category: Baldur's Gate
Genre: F/M, Gore, M/M, Suicide, multiple AUs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 20:40:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 3,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21574966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/farevenasdecidedtouse/pseuds/farevenasdecidedtouse
Summary: Scenes, snippets, and errata confined to the margins of multiple universes.
Relationships: Female Charname/Safana, Male Charname/Haer'Dalis, Sarevok/Tamoko
Comments: 24
Kudos: 5
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	1. To the Lower Tombs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Blueinkedfrost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blueinkedfrost/gifts).



“This place is bloody terrible.”

“I see what you did there.”

“Did you really clean it out before, or did they just make that many more vampires while you were rescuing me? It sucks down here.”

“Imoen, this is somehow getting less funny the longer you go on.”

“Hey, I have a stake in all this too. Don’t start coughin’ and moanin’ about me trying to add a little humor!”

“Can we take your soul back out again so we don’t have to listen to this?”

“Love you too, big brother.”


	2. Over Troubled Waters

Yoshimo’s lord might once have granted him an honorable death, even with Yoshimo’s soul bound by the corrupting magic that has twined itself with his being like a worm-devoured fruit. A noble escape to the realms of Kelemvor from the woman who has believed his lies, has given him her all whether casting herself between him and an ogre mage or laughing with him over cups of firewine. Who calls him the brother she wished she had.

He cannot grant himself this honor. An outcast, a ronin, his attempts at saving face in this part of the world would be meaningless in any case. But in his travels and his late captivity he has learned that there is a difference between saving face and doing what is right. The note he left tucked into her pack serves as an explanation, and he hopes that she, the family he has left behind, and Kelemvor himself will all understand. Hopes that what he does is right after all.

He spares one last thought for her face, broad and earnest and sad, before pitching forward off the bridge into the night-black waters of the Sea of Swords. It is the easiest thing in the world to let the waters claim his consciousness, then his life. 


	3. After the Flood

It’s been two weeks since the last of the violence and all Cernick can see when he closes his eyes are the bodies he’s been hauling from the keep every day, yuan-ti and umber hulks and De’Arnise men jumbled into a mosaic of death behind his eyes. Sleep generally comes after several draughts of evermead from His late Lordship’s rapidly depleting private stores that blurs the mosaic still further until individual faces no longer leap at him from the morass.

Truly, he’s happy the Lady Nalia was able to bring in those mercenaries. As far as such bands went, they weren’t bad—demanding no more reward than had been promised, hardly breaking anything, even managing to get around whatever spell the bastards had Glacius under. Their leader, a half-elf who looked like he’d barely grown his first beard but had the look in his eyes of someone who’d seen far too much, had even apologized for not staying around to help with the rebuilding. _I’m truly sorry. I wish we could, we just have other business we may have left too long by now_. _Tymora’s own luck be with you._

He was probably telling the truth. Still, it must have been nice to drop everything and run off to some next adventure, leaving everyone to their troubles after doing your own part.


	4. If Tempus Wills It

The dark chasm of the ship’s inside was a maelstrom like the one that had landed it in the grove. To Branwen’s left glowed a pair of eyes like embers—she hurled the word of power she had held back for this moment, brought down her flail with every remaining vestige of strength, but she felt the mace fall in a glancing blow off the werewolf's shoulder. Something gave way beneath her breastbone and then the pain was torn from her with bone-white, gore-red claws, raw and bare and open, so open, as the others surged toward her and around her to deliver the belated vengeance of Tempus. An axe stroke, a jet of flame to its snarling muzzle, and it fell to the height her head now was.

Battle cries and shouts of warning and pain transformed themselves into a single murmur as she felt the neck of a potion bottle against her lips, as a curl of healing magic slipped around her, through her, past her, like the rest of the fading light. The murmurs became cries of dismay at this, and from outside her own body she could feel-see their hands on her, holding, begging, entreating.

 _It’s all right, my friends. Tempus will keep me well,_ she tried to say. But the words slipped into nothing as she did.


	5. A Metaphor

The full-skirted gown of crimson silk which had made Elisa’s skin glow like bronze had been rotted to the knees by a wad of stinking green slime effluvia. One of the sleeves, fitted to the elbow and belled to her hips, sported an arrow rent, the other having been torn entirely from her arm by the grasping fingerbones of a skeleton warrior whose head she had subsequently blasted from its shoulders with a barrage of magic missiles. Ruby silk slippers she had insisted be comfortable enough to run in still adorned her feet, darkened by sweat and the dirty floor into a russet-brown hue.

“Look on the bright side.” Safana, her own slinky azure extravagance tailored skillfully over leather and cast off like a wilted petal near the maze's entrance, placed two fingers on her bare shoulder. “Wear this out of here and you could start a fashion trend.”

Elisa pursed her lips, glancing around for any further threats. "I feel like there's a metaphor in all of this."

“Hmm. You becoming a deadly, divine butterfly?”

“I was thinking more a bull in a glassblower’s. A magic bull.”

Safana drew her arms around Elisa’s waist, pulling her around the last wall they had passed to press a kiss to her lips. “Darling, I think Minsc must have a more poetic soul than yours.”

“Well, that’s what I have you for.” Elisa squeezed Safana’s hips before stepping away. “Come on, the others should be finished looting. Let’s go find that bastard.”


	6. Sparrow's Song

It seems to Haer’Dalis some days that his heart is a moth that has traded one flame for a brighter one entirely. A blazing star far too accessible, the center of the grand orrery of godchild and companions and enemies wheeling about each other, about the Prime in a dance far too complex for a simple sparrow to comprehend. Yet, he cannot deny his raven’s flame. Will not deny him.

And so he transcribes his raven’s passage through the Realms, poetic embellishment at a minimum (who could truly improve upon the perfection of such a narrative?) His desire for Kirin, and Kirin’s for him, is not a footnote, but perhaps the page upon which he writes—this love born of desperation and need, their rutting in soot-dark tavern garrets and twilit groves of strange Prime trees this same astrological dance reflected in miniature. No matter how many times his hands map the fine bones beneath star-blue skin, how many times the whole of him flames as Kirin’s throat convulses around the head of his shaft or his own hands breach his raven’s innermost reaches to cries and curses hardly muffled by walls or distance, the moth retreats, but never forsakes its flame entirely.

These things he keeps from the greater tale. But they form a part of his song along with those which will one day be heard and known throughout every part of the Prime, and so he holds them jealously as a wyrm. Perhaps the Realms will never hear of their love, or even the planes beyond. But for him to know that his all was consumed by this desire, a single, bright flare in the progress of entropy and oblivion, is enough.


	7. Apples and Grimoires

Visiting scholars are rare enough that their presence is always a holiday affair, even when it means Imoen and Kementiri are forced to air out the guest rooms and peel endless pie apples with a knife that ought to send the peels flying off with a single flick but does so about half the time, if that. The best food always comes out for the visitors—Winthrop produces his stashes of cinnamon and hundred-year-old firewine and even the xoclatl liquor brought by a very few Maztican traders.  _ May as well get their money’s worth, eh? Or their book’s worth _ , he always says, pretending not to notice as Imoen and Kem steal fingers of fluffy sugar-whipped cream or crackling pork edges from the food being sent out.

The scholars are all so different from the old, robed humans Kem is used to—tall, coldly beautiful Red Wizards with shaved and tattooed heads and phylacteries around their necks, gaggles of young Chultans or Chessentan initiates following around harried-looking archmages and marveling at everything so commonplace for Kem, and once, a skyship full of Harulaans laughing and casting cantrips for them to marvel at. One of them had been a short, merry woman whose walnut skin and golden hair looked so close to ten-year-old Kem’s that her heart leapt before she saw the shoes on the mage’s feet. Now, in her much greater nineteen-year-old wisdom she knows that she will never see her mother on a skyship or anywhere in the Prime, leading to a few stolen glances at necromantic texts with Imoen’s help and knowledge of how to pick the locks on some of the harder library cabinets. The diagrams of dead bodies and Hands of Glory and the alchemic composition of ectoplasm had stirred something inside her she could not name, some great, terrible, beautiful thing that even now lurks in the darker edges of her mind.

_Someday,_ she tells herself, rolling a neck stiff from crouching over a wilted rose in the corner of the garden furthest from any library windows, repeating the words of power to return it to its healthy bloom. _Someday_ _I’ll be the one visiting here and eating the best food and looking at the most powerful tomes on the Negative Plane so I can ask my mother what happened myself. Someday._


	8. A Reunion of Some Description

“You could come with us. You know, if you want.”

Two eyes swiveled to rest on Nia, followed by the other three. “What? Nah, I can find my own way out.”

Nia shook her head. A drop of blood from the lucky shot the Drow captain had gotten to her temple ran down the side of her face, and she wiped it away on her sleeve. “No, I mean come  _ with  _ us. You were technically just working for the captain here, right? So come help us take out my latest sister and then… well, you can take off if you want, but with a beholder on our side? No one west of Kara-Tur would fuck with us.”

In front of her the beholder bobbed unsteadily in place like someone with legs awkwardly shifting their weight. “I dunno. There’s a reason I don’t spend a whole lot of time outside monster circles. Besides, won’t you get some pretty bad reactions walking into a tavern or whatever you guys do with me floating in behind you?”

Nia barked out a laugh. “What, a worse reaction than the two half-orcs, the Drow, the demonspawn, and Living Dead Guy over there already do? Besides, at this point anyone who has a problem with you is gonna have to face down the five people who took on the entire Tethyrian army and lived to talk about it. You’re safer in the eye of the storm than outside it, as dear ol’ dad used to say.”

“Sounds like you guys can take care of yourselves just fine, then.”

“I’m not saying we’re lost without you, idiot. I’m saying you seem like a good guy to travel with and you’d be welcome to come with now that we’ve killed yet another guy you were stuck with. Besides, I bet Imoen’d love to see you again.”

Four eyes blinked. “What, the squeaky pink one? Where’s she at?”

“Right now? Suldenassellar, the elf city.” Nia flicked a strand of spiderweb away from her face with a blood-crusted nail. “She never deserved any of this crap, so I’m taking care of business while she gets better. She really liked you—probably cheer her up a bunch to see a friendly face once we’re done taking care of my other asshole brothers and sisters.”

“All right, I’m in. But… are beholders allowed in elf cities?”

Nia grinned tiredly. “I have a feeling they’ll be finding out the answer is ‘yes’ pretty soon.”


	9. Between the Shadows

“Tamoko!” Lady Priestess Agnasia’s voice was a light in the darkness of her thoughts, and Tamoko wrenched her attention away from her attempt to pray. “Gods’ love, tell me you have some healing left in you? There’s a man who’s been poisoned.”

“I can stop the poison,” Tamoko replied, rising to her feet from the thin mat that also served as her bed in the refugee camp, “but whatever damage it has done must resolve itself. Where is he?”

The man in question turned out to be a half-orc twice Tamoko’s height and breadth, wrestled onto one of the two remaining cots in the healer’s tent Agnasia and her fellow clerics had pitched uncomfortably close to the river. The banishment of the poison was the work of a moment - Tamoko placed three fingertips on the sweat-beaded patch of skin over the part of the forehead most susceptible to magic, letting the Storm Lord’s raw power course through them both like divine wind until his restless movements stopped, leaving him pale and weak but alive as the divine power drained from her once more. Power the man she loved had once promised her in unlimited measure once his ascension was complete, power she had finally begged him not to seek for the sake of what they had found in its pursuit.

And now only she remained, healing those she would once have dutifully murdered for her beloved, steps toward a redemption she knew would never truly come.

She braced herself against the frame of the cot only to feel herself born up by Agnasia who helped her onto a low camp stool near the door. “His friends said he’d been foregoing their rations and eating from a dead horse they’d found. Thought he could handle any corruption where they couldn’t,” she said, lowering herself onto another stool to resume the preparation of a healing poultice. “They dragged him in here when he started sweating and vomiting and couldn’t protest any more. Thank you for helping him.”

“It is what we have all come here for,” Tamoko replied.

“Perhaps, but even the other clerics think you’re particularly dutiful. Especially them. Not that half those cushy-arsed bastards, myself certainly not excluded, would know duty unless they saw someone performing it well enough to put them to shame. Pass me those scales?”

Tamoko retrieved the scales from Agnasia’s locked chest with a shrug. “I have lost all. I have little enough to do but what I may.”

Agnasia hesitated, then placed a hand on Tamoko’s arm. “Sometimes it takes losing everything you have to find who you really are. Take it from me.”

“I understand,” Tamoko said, wondering if she ever truly would.


	10. From Brynlaw

“This is Dili,” Ginia had told him, taking the little girl’s hand and helping her over the last step of the gangplank. “The nice lady said she’s going to be coming with us to Baldur’s Gate too. Be nice to her or you’re ballast.”

Ason stuck his tongue out at Ginia, but after a few days Dili turned out not to be so bad for such a little kid. Mostly she just wanted to know what Brynnlaw was like—what they’d ate, where they lived, if they knew the pirates. He’d told her the good stuff and the bad—the pirates who yelled threats but sometime showed him treasures or tossed him coins. Picking wild coconuts with Ginia before the birds knocked all of them into the sea. The way the sun shone off the water at sunset, looking like a white road of more sand that he could take Ginia’s hand and walk away on to somewhere better. Dili didn’t say much apart from that she’d come from the asylum—probably Ginia or the elf lady had told her not to—and what she did say sounded better than working for Chremy, but not much. Every time he showed her something new—a shooting star, the whale breaching their fifth day out of port, a story about hiding in a barrel from a pirate whose bracelet he’d lifted right off her wrist, the look on Dili’s face was somewhere between happy and scared, like it was all a dream she didn’t really want to wake up from.

Ason had definitely had enough of those to know how it felt.

One day Calahan gave him and Ginia each an orange ( _my own stash,_ he’d said with a wink) and Ason had stepped over to where Dili was sitting by the rail to give her half before he really knew what he was doing. The look on her face was worth half an orange, and as he passed it to her she whispered, “Can I show you a secret?”

She led him belowdecks, squeezing behind a stack of tarps just big enough for the two of them. Ason had just turned around to ask what the secret was only to just about jump out of his skin to see the mirror that had somehow appeared behind him. He didn’t know what to say when the perfect copy of him started (very quietly) giggling with Dili’s voice and reached out to put its hands up to its lips—all he could do was stare. But he didn’t say a word.

“I think Dili’s a mirrorskin,” he finally told Ginia a couple of days later when they were alone on the topdeck watching what might have been a sea cat in the distance.

Ginia made like she was about to pinch him, then just shook her head sadly. “The lady said she wasn’t a doppelganger. She’s just a sad little girl who was born to a family who didn’t want to deal with what she had. So they sent her to the asylum where she had it worse than we ever did. At least Chremy wasn’t doing experiments on us.”

Ason wasn’t sure what she meant by “experiments,” but if it had happened in the asylum he figured it was pretty bad. Ginia, meanwhile, knelt down in front of him and took his hands like she always did when she had something important to say.

“You’ve always been a good protector for me,” she told him, “but now Chremy’s gone I don’t need protecting, at least not like I used to. But Dili does. Make sure she never does that where anyone else can see, and make sure she stays out of trouble. I know you can.”

Ason thought about it. All the times he’d tried to stand between Chremy and Ginia when he went to hit her. The way Dili’s face lit up when she saw something for the first time. The lady who’d gotten them off the island, her face fiercer than Ason had ever seen when Ginia had told her about their problems and she’d sworn to help them like it was the only thing that mattered.

“I can,” he told her. “I promise.”


End file.
